Can you hear that? A certain high frequency hum which, until recently, was perceptible only to dogs, bats, and cryptography cognoscenti? It’s the mounting buzz over “blockchain”—an umbrella term referring to a number of shared ledger services that promise to revolutionize every aspect of social and political exchange, from financial transactions to medical data, voter registration to birth certificates. Due in large part to the way they address the twinned threats of system failure and malicious users which plague our …
Machine as Organism: Technology, Biology, and Collective
The constant increases in technological capacity, prevalence of automation and machine assistance, and the advancement of bio-tech, artificial intelligence, and medical technologies, expedite the tendency to view the issue of human subjectivity through a dichotomy of man/machine. This framing pre-inscribes a frictional relationship between man and machine, as if machines desire to, and are succeeding in closing the ontological gap between human beings and machines and/or artificial intelligences. The paradoxical novelty that wearable technology presents us (both …
Workshop Recap: R and Twitter
In the first workshop of the fall semester, Lars Hinrichs brought his knowledge of English Language and Linguistics to the DWRL for an introduction to R and Twitter. While Twitter’s reputation certainly preceded itself, the workshop began with an introduction to R — a necessary introduction for those of us unfamiliar with current research practices in the digital humanities. As a programming language, R is an open-source tool for statistical analysis and visualization. For a range of scholars interested in …
Bibliography Management
In high school, works cited pages always gave me pause. I would print the specifications of the bibliography style and take great care not to misplace a period or a comma. Invariably, it took me far longer than I expected. When I was in college, I started to use sites like Easybib. But by then, I had a lot more material to review and it wasn’t as simple as producing a works cited page. What I needed was an easier …
“Doing Digital Visual Studies” with Laurie Gries
As part of our spring 2017 Speaker Series, the Digital Writing & Research Lab hosted Dr. Laurie Gries, whose lecture “Doing Digital Visual Studies” reflects upon and extends the research she undertook in her award-winning book Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. In her longitudinal study of Shepard Fairey’s “Obama Hope,” she developed a digital, visual methodology called iconographic tracking in order “to trace the circulation, transformation, and consequentiality of new media images.” Dr. Gries’s …
Invisible Knowledge
Since you’re reading this online publication, I imagine that you, like me, leave hundreds of digital traces every day. A lot of these traces are things we can see–things like emails, texts, blog posts, twitter posts, photographs, Youtube comments, or Facebook likes. But today I’m particularly interested in the invisible, unintentional digital traces we leave–things like records of our internet searches and website visits, or the location data that logs our movements and phone calls. There’s knowledge in the invisible …
Data Visualization: Visualizing Sound Texts
In an upcoming lesson plan, I introduce some ways in which visualization be used to analyze elements of a literary text such as genre, theme, motifs, or plot structure. However, that lesson plan focuses predominantly on visual works. What are some of the ways in which visualization could be used to explore sound compositions, such as music? Visualizing audio texts allows students in literature classes to convey information without requiring a background in musical theory. …
Lesson Plan: Narrative Numbers
By Sierra Mendez & Sarah Welsh Maybe we can begin by blaming Plato for his view that math, specifically geometry, was the one perfect truth in the world–a belief systematically strengthened by science’s insistent reliance on empirical, numerical data as “truth.” These notions have been adopted into the public conscious, leaving people with the tendency to treat quantitative evidence as unquestionable facts that are above argument. Most students tend to say things like “numbers speak for themselves” when instead they …
Lesson Plan: Visualizing and Analyzing Texts with Voyant
In writing and literature classes, we teach our students to gather evidence from close reading in order to support their arguments. In what ways could data visualization charts actually aid processes of reading? The visualization tool Voyant allows the user to track the relative appearance and context of specific words and phrases in a specific body of text, from a poem to an entire corpus. While digital tool analysis by no means replaces close reading, it can be useful for …
Lesson Plan: Photography, Photoshop, and Visual Rhetoric
By Sierra Mendez & Sarah Welsh This data visualization lesson plan focuses on image manipulation across a variety of sources. It matters to us and to the classroom because 21st century forms of media and knowledge dissemination demand that we be able to interpret and utilize visual forms of information. Photos are a key component of modern data visualization whether they make up the data itself or are integrated into an infographic. An acknowledgement and understanding of how photos are …